“Weedy? You hurt me. I prefer tall and scrawny. Unlike my partner, who’s right behind you.”
Scarlett turned. There were a lot of people wandering around…people with massive baby strollers, joggers, the lost, the tourists, the assorted insane. Cutting through them and walking directly for Scarlett and Spencer was a guy that Scarlett felt like she knew. He was just a hair shorter than Spencer, but fuller and more muscular where Spencer was, as she had just commented, weedy. He had sandy hair, loosely cut and slightly overgrown in a very appealing way. There was something almost uneven about his face—one side of his mouth kept creeping up in a smile where the other stayed flat. His clothes were nondescript, just a black T-shirt and a pair of green cargo shorts. He managed to look ordinary, but it was the most engrossing kind of ordinary that Scarlett had ever seen. Ordinary plus.
“Sorry,” he said as he approached. “I had to take the subway. My scooter wouldn’t start. Have you learned all your lines?”
His voice was deep and full, with a very slight Southern drawl softening the end of every word.
“I learned the whole play,” Spencer said. “Backward. Meet my sister. She’s here to help. Eric, this is Scarlett. Scarlett, this is Eric.”
Eric smiled at her like he had known her forever. And it still felt that way. She had seen him. She knew him. He was pointing at her like he knew her as well.
“I saw you,” Eric said. “Just recently. Today.”
“Was it on TV?” Scarlett asked, feeling her face flush.
“Yes! When I was at the gym. You were on some morning show.”
Spencer’s head whipped in her direction. She held up her hands.
“It was an accident,” she said. “I took Marlene to a taping. I was supposed to be in the audience, and I ended up making these…quesadillas.”
“Oh,” Spencer said with a nod. That wasn’t like really being on TV. It wasn’t like she had gotten a recurring role on a sitcom. He relaxed.
“I feel like I’ve seen you, too,” she said.
Eric nodded.
“Was I doing this?” he asked.
He pulled off his backpack and took a running dive and rolled across the ground, doing three summersaults in a row, all the while clapping at himself like he was on fire.
Amazingly, this did ring a bell.
“It was the commercial,” he explained, dusting himself off and walking back. “It got stuck in a lot of people’s heads, but no one can really remember where they saw me.”
“That’s it!” Scarlett said. He had played a guy who accidentally set himself on fire cooking dinner, and then ended up getting a pizza delivered while he was still smoking slightly. It had been on constantly around Christmas.
“We’re both TV stars,” he said.
Scarlett felt her chin go a little weak, like it was about to drip off her face.
“Let me see that again,” Spencer said.
“What, the roll?”
Spencer nodded. Eric did it again, running and diving onto the ground, rolling three times, clapping feverishly. Spencer watched carefully, cocking his head to the side. Then he set his script down and recreated it perfectly, adding an extra roll.
“That was good,” Eric said. “When I first tried it, they wanted me to do it like this…”
And then it really began—a showdown the likes of which Scarlett had never seen. She was used to Spencer doing this on his own, to entertain her, or whoever was around, or just for his own personal amusement. She wasn’t aware that other people spent their time doing the same things, especially people like Eric.
Spencer started by fake-punching himself in the face, complete with an authentic punching noise and reaction (called the “nap,” Scarlett had been told). He knocked himself completely to the ground. Eric was duly impressed by this, and did the same thing to himself, but in the stomach, throwing himself back very far. Spencer countered by pretending to trip and throwing himself over two separate benches—the second one, backward. Eric couldn’t top that. They exchanged fake blows for a while, comparing the noises they made. Then, there were backflips.
After about an hour, it came down to the issue of who could walk on their hands the longest. In this, Spencer was slightly at a loss. He was fairly strong, but Eric had much bigger, stronger arms. Spencer went a lot of steps quickly before rolling over. Eric was slower, but unquestionably more powerful. He kept going for a full minute after Spencer.
“What did you think?” he asked, as he gracefully let himself down. He was out of breath and his face was deeply red. “Who wins?”
Spencer was back on his hands, trying again.
“You’re good,” she said.
“Yeah, but he’s really good. He’s got skills. Serious skills. He has to show me how to do that fall.”
Spencer wandered off on his hands, mumbling his lines. He disappeared around the statue.
“But you won,” she said. “Definitely. You stayed up longer.”
He smiled that uneven smile.